The Wanderer
by MiddayFiddler
Summary: When a person gets older, he starts to think about unnecessary things - like his life, whether he lived it well, whether he did all he could manage, whether he has something to regret. That is what he had been hearing all those decades, when he was too busy to actually listen to blabbering of drunk old man in the ramen stall at midnight.


The wandering monks were walking down the village, silently and slowly, as if every step of theirs was burdened by all the misery mankind had ever endured.

He was sitting on the porch under the lilac tree, letting the final rays of rusty autumn sun fall on his hands. The days were getting shorter with coming winter, and the wind blowing to his kimono sleeves was sharp and carrying a faint scent of ash and burning cane. There was no smoke to be seen, but his eyes were clouded and it seemed like smoke from his cigarettes had permanently lingered on his eyelids. He should have regretted smoking by now, with his raspy voice and hardly being able to catch breath after walking up two stairs to the kiosk to buy newspaper and nights spent coughing his old lungs out. It was then, in the hour just before the dawn, when the sleep avoided his doorstep and the foxes and weasels were finding shelter from rain and snow on his windowsill, when he wished he could remember how to regret. He wished to remember many things, but that one seemed most important.

The wanderers were barefoot, leaving soft footprints on the dusty road. It reminded him of another place in another time - or in entirely another universe, he was not sure – where roads were covered with dust, too, but that one was gray and scarred by the myriads of tires that were crossing through it tirelessly. Then there was no dust, but stone, and the stone might be uneven and the tiny spaces between the tiles full of cigarette butts and broken heels, but it does not scar or break. And after that, there was asphalt, but he left too soon to see how it would endure the never-stopping movement of the city. He is not even curious; the city he left was not the one he came to.

He missed it though. He knew because he dreamt about it, miniscule daydreams while waiting in the market to pay for lamp oil or smoking his evening pipe leaning on the window to the back garden – because the cigarettes in the shop here are too expensive and taste like pure tar – that is when pictures show up in his head. He did not know which ones were true and which ones were just the meddling on his brain that had always been far too soft on him, anymore.

There are black uniforms, swords and words of honour and heart of a samurai. There are rooftops with falling tiles and snack bar brawls that sometimes ended with having weird concoctions all over his jacket and sometimes with getting shot. There is a carrousel with plastic horses with wings looking far too miserable; there is a silver haired samurai looking far too careless – there is something terribly, incorrigibly wrong with both. Where is that man now? No, he knows – unchanged and still as lazy and uselessly heroic, lying on that blue sofa and laughing on his kids, that will never grow old and die, because that is what all of them damn deserve. Their huge dog rampaging through the streets. The screams. There is screaming everywhere; the happy, motherly one. It does not come to him as weird anymore.

There are two men and it seems they were his family. No, they all were, as much as he can recognize what a family is. There are beetles and free days spent in movie theatres, watching movies he does not remember more than general feeling, taste of popcorn and the huge hat of tall man sitting in front of him of. There are nights filled with emptiness and thousands of letters never sent. Spilled ink. Streetlights.

There is a woman. He left her, than found her again and held her in his arms until she promised she would never turn into dust on the road. They danced to the old songs they did not know steps to, they laughed and ate New Year's mochi on the veranda and he lent her his jacket to shelter her from cold and snow and everything else. There are tangerines and her smile is warmer than hot chocolate, warmer than kotatsu, so is her skin – sometimes too warm, too pale, sometimes his jacket is not enough to make her stop trembling. No, there is rain and coughing and rooftops bathed in the sad sunlight whose rays are breaking on the teardrops in his eyes. She died – that he knows for sure. She has a grave on the graveyard down the road he never visits. Whether she died before or after dancing and tangerines, he does not know. He cannot recall her face either way.

The sun set down and the monks were almost gone but for the last few. He looked down. The age spots on his hands had gotten more visible, the wrinkles deeper and the calluses obtained years ago merging into his skin. He did not remember how his hands had looked before; he had never thought about them. When a person gets older, he starts to think about unnecessary things - like his life, whether he lived it well, whether he did all he could manage, whether he has something to regret. That is what he had been hearing all those decades, when he was too busy to listen to blabbering of drunk old man in the ramen stall at midnight. He thought about his hands instead, and the white fox that came every evening to beg for a bowl of milk, and when and why he had decided to spend the rest of his life in this god-forgotten place.

He thought and almost overheard one of the belated monks, who had taken too much of the human pain and regrets to keep up with their companions.

"Hey, old man! Whose is that huge run-down dojo next to your house? It must have been so beautiful at its time!"

He raised his head and looked to his right side, but all he saw in the distance was impenetrable darkness.

"I don't remember," he said, and turned to enter the house.


End file.
